(By Pat Bryson) Here’s one of my favorite definitions of the marketing process: “Marketing is the buying and selling of things with goodwill at a profit. If you can only have one, take goodwill because it is tomorrow’s profit.”
Your clients need to build long-term relationships with their customers. It’s important to create repeat customers because:
- The lifetime value of a customer is a large number. A customer who spends just $20 a week will spend $1,000 in a year and $30,000 or more over a lifetime.
- Repeat customers are happy customers who tend to increase their yearly purchases, recommend your client’s business to others, and step up to more deluxe products that yield a higher margin.
- The cost of acquiring new customers is very high.
The first step in keeping customers is finding out why you lose them. Lost customers can tell you exactly what parts of your business you must improve. I rarely use any service, online or in person, that doesn’t send me an email asking me to fill out a survey on my experience. Smart companies use this feedback to improve the customer experience.
As clients try to measure their ROI, we must remind them of the above numbers. Advertising is designed to create traffic: to get potential customers to contact them for the first time, whether in person or virtually. Consistent advertising with the right frequency and message will do this. It’s up to our clients to sell them, please them, and convert them into long-term customers.
“I didn’t sell enough this weekend to pay for my advertising.” What a customer spends the first time they buy from a business is the tip of the iceberg. The real gold is in repeat customers. Happy, satisfied customers tell others about their experiences. Our clients’ advertising can mushroom exponentially when happy customers spread the good word. Sales grow.
“I get most of my business from referrals. A friend told them about me.” Yes, but who told the friend? Many times, the customer zero came from advertising. Unless we prepare clients that customers two and three indirectly came from customer one (who heard it on the radio) we never get credit for the second and third levels.
We need to educate our clients and remind them of the long-term value of a customer so that we may hear, “My advertising is working!”
Happy Selling!
Pat Bryson is the CEO of Bryson Broadcasting International, a consulting firm that works with sales managers and salespeople to raise revenue. She is the author of two books, A Road Map to Success in High-Dollar Broadcast Sales and Successful Broadcast Sales: Thriving in Change available on her website. Read Pat’s Radio Ink archives here.
